Bird similes abound throughout the Comedy. I find this one, in which Dante compares himself to a fledgling stork, delightful: Ostensibly, Dante is making a play for our sympathy here by presenting himself as young and eager for knowledge yet hesitant to ask a question, doubtless out of reverence for the older and wiser Virgil. […]
Except for the good pagan poets found in limbo, Dante places all the poets in his Comedy among the saved, most of them high on the slopes of purgatory. Poets have a high calling in life and this is reflected in their fate after death. Dante is keenly aware of the poet’s mission as prophet: […]
Virgil’s great exposition on love is centrally placed in the Comedy, occupying Cantos 17 and 18 of Purgatorio. With this, Dante signals that love, and the understanding of love, are at the heart of his poetic matter. Doctrinally, the ideas Dante attributes to Virgil are standard-issue medieval philosophy, derived from the teachings of Aristotle and […]
Life’s not a zero-sum game, say the souls on the terrace of envy, so don’t live it that way. Dante doesn’t ‘get it’ at first, but Virgil explains. We have just met Guido del Duca, scion of one of the leading families of Romagna, the region next-door to Tuscany, where Dante comes from. Like all […]
On a cold, dull and windy day I went to Weston to see the monster. At a distance it looked disappointingly small, dwarfed by miles of empty sand and sea, but as I walked along the beach it grew until its full scale was apparent. So, too, was its oddity. The monster – a repurposed […]
The Divine Comedy is primarily a vision. It is the story of how one man, through grace, becomes pure in heart and hence able to see God. During his first night on the mountain, Dante’s damaged inner sight is cleansed and healed in preparation for the work of penitence that awaits him in purgatory proper. […]
Like the penitent souls, the poets cannot climb once the sun has gone down and so must halt for the night. The twilight hour draws from Dante some of his loveliest lines: These lines are recalled every evening at the tomb of Dante in Ravenna, where the bell of the nearby church chimes 13 times […]
The first canto of Purgatorio celebrates our release from the pain and grief of hell. Virgil washes Dante’s face in the morning dew. Dante begins by announcing the change of mood: Boats and ships feature strongly in the Comedy, as symbols of the soul’s journey towards the divine. Here Dante is at the helm, his […]
We are out of hell, but still close to the centre of the earth and it is still dark. Through the blackness, Dante can hear the trickling of a stream: The hidden passage that connects Inferno and Purgatorio is one of Dante’s masterstrokes, entirely his own invention. It conveys the idea that there is, after […]
In the final canto of the Inferno Dante must confront Satan, where he lies trapped in ice at the centre of the material world and the universe. The deepest part of hell, the ninth circle, is Cocytus, a frozen lake shrouded in thick fog and blasted by icy winds. It is fitting that this place […]
Ulysses is the greatest of the Inferno’s tragic heroes. Dante’s invented story of his last voyage is about leaders who lie. We are among the false councillors, in the eighth ditch of the Malebolge in Circle 8, the first circle of the fraudulent, close to the lowest depths of hell. These gifted people, often […]
There are moments in the Comedy when Dante burns with righteous anger. One of them is his encounter with the simoniac popes. Strictly defined, simony is the buying or selling of spiritual gifts, offices or artefacts. A form of corruption, it’s named after Simon Magus, a first-century sorcerer who is said to have asked the […]
In any sane context the car crash that is Conservative education policy would be enough to bring down a government by itself. The schools bill before Parliament has been so savaged in the House of Lords that ministers have stripped out 18 of the key clauses, leaving it bereft of its original purpose, yet doing […]
On burning sands, under a soft rain of flames, Dante meets his former mentor, Brunetto Latini. His “sin” is homosexuality, according to the dictates of formal religion. But what does Dante think? We are in the circle of the violent against God, nature and art. The naked souls here, whose baked features are caked with […]
Andrew George is calling on the Conservatives on Cornwall Council to reverse their decision to cut crucial funding for the Royal Cornwall Museum. Andrew is a Cornwall Councillor and has raised questions with the Council’s audit committee which meets later this week. Andrew said, “When your Party runs the country with an 80 seat majority, holds all MP seats in Cornwall and […]
The government’s trashing of arts education will do great harm to the UK’s ‘soft power’. But as Tom Scott explains, the damage will go deeper than that. A few days ago, I was at a meeting of University and College Union (UCU) delegates from around the country. Hearing from other delegates about the swathe of […]
Suicide is the ultimate form of self-harm. In Inferno 13, Dante forges a new language of pain and despair to evoke the tortured minds of those who choose this ending. At the start of the canto we return to the landscape of the poem’s prologue, finding ourselves, again, in a pathless wood – not coincidentally, […]
I just spent 45 minutes sitting in a bunker in central Exeter listening to sirens and bombs. This was Four Of Swords Theatre’s performance To Refuge, based around a work by Ukrainian playwright Elena Hapieieva: In the Bowels of the Earth. It was immersive theatre at its most intense. The performance takes place under The […]
I interviewed Stroud-based printmaker and artist Nat Morley about her unique processes, her protest art and her time spent with Barrel Well Aboriginal Community, Australia. Nat was a prize-winning geographer at Oxford University, sings with Tewkesbury Abbey choir, and her artwork is on permanent display at the Cotswold Craftsmen Gallery in Nailsworth. Leslie: What are the main artistic medium/areas you work in? […]
The film ‘Operation Mincemeat’ released over the Easter weekend, tells the exciting story of a key event in the second World War. The Germans were tricked into thinking that an attack on Europe from North Africa would start in Greece rather than the more obvious route through Sicily. Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper called it “The most […]
We wrote about the wonderful Ashburton Arts Centre back in October 2020 and director Andy Williamson explained why the venue was so loved by performers. The Tinners Moon Festival, which had had to be cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic, is in full swing right now and you really shouldn’t miss the opportunity to […]
Regular readers of my Facebook posts will know that it is my position that this current government is dangerous because of its incompetence. I recognise that many of you find them to be cruel, or their policies deliberately designed towards the vicious and unnecessary, but my own experience is that they haven’t got a clue […]
“They’ve got under my skin”, says Lyme Regis artist Christine Allison, as she stands in the museum’s quirky rotunda, surrounded by the metre-square ‘portraits’ of six highly individual trees. “And I realise that I am approaching painting them as I would a portrait of a human or an animal.” Gnarled and twisted or smooth and […]
It was probably due to World War Two and the British servicemen returning from Italy that interest in Italian food began to take off in the UK… as immortalised by Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers. As regards pasta, in the 1950s one had to shop at International Stores or J Sainsbury to buy macaroni and […]
Among the carnal sinners in the second circle of hell, we meet Paolo and Francesca. Of all the stories in the Inferno, theirs is perhaps the one that most invites our empathy: which of us has not been where they are? Dante’s scene-setting is a powerful example of contrapasso – the idea that the punishment […]
No sooner are the poets through the gate than the full force of hell hits Dante: I so admire this passage! In a few deft strokes Dante evokes the overwhelming cacophony of sounds that is his first impression of hell. Sounds not sights, for he can see little in the dim light where no stars […]
“Carrero Blanco was blown up two streets away,” Isabel, my señora, mentioned casually on a chilly Madrid afternoon in December 1983 as we sat in her luxurious flat on Calle Hermosilla. “Have you heard of him? Ten years ago today, ETA blew up his car in Claudio Coello and it flew right over a church. […]
In early 2021 Plymouth’s “Look II” sculpture by Sir Antony Gormley was in the headlines. Opinions on the sculpture varied, but publicity focused on its price. I welcomed new grant-funded public art to the city, but because Plymouth City Council refused to disclose the cost of the sculpture, I shared other people’s concerns about secrecy. […]
Led by Virgil, Dante sets out on his journey. At the entrance to hell he sees these words inscribed over a dark gateway: The famous line here is the last, wryly quoted today in many a workplace and home. The absence of hope is the defining feature of hell, as anyone stuck in a dead-end […]
Reason, sweet reason! How we – or some of us, at least – long for you in the age of Brexit, Trumpism and other mass delusions. As in our time, so in Dante’s. At the end of my first tasting note we left Dante confused and terrified, alone in the “dark wood” of his erring […]